Fête accompli

Poor Matthew Williamson. One minute Prince is doing a cabaret turn on your catwalk, the next you’re cancelling the dinner that you had planned to commemorate your retrospective at the Design Museum last night because you discover that it clashes with at least two others. And they say no one in fashion eats.

Let us break with cynical tradition and suppose that no one invited to Williamson’s dinner would have willingly declined had the invitations to Kate Moss’s dinner at Annabel’s not been dispatched aeons ago. Factor in the exciting deus ex machina of a Marchesa dinner and we begin to see the basis for an unfolding tragedy. Marchesa, you’ll recall, is the evening-wear label designed by the drop-dead cheekbone configuration otherwise known as Keren Craig and Georgina Chapman and worn by such Hollywood actresses as Renée Zellweger and Cate Blanchett. Chapman’s boy friend is Harvey Weinstein. Their dinner last night was destined to be glamour in extremis. A lot of the invitees found that, yes, after reexamining their diaries, they were free.

This is not just about modern manners; it’s a tale about what our country has become: a giant party. On Monday night Naomi Watts hosted one for Calvin Klein in honour of the Turner Prize winner Martin Creed. When they say hosted we can probably assume that Watts didn’t grill the cocktail sausages herself. Even so, you may ask why an Oscar nominee got involved. But that’s for another time. Tomorrow it’s Fashion Rocks. In a fortnight Alicia Keys performs at a party – to celebrate the launch of a lingerie range.

So much for London but it’s not exactly Puritans a go-go elsewhere: party conferences, parties in the park or on the pier, parties to celebrate our boys getting into the finals, parties to mark the first episode of the latest X-Factor and at least two awards ceremonies a week - honestly, it’s a testament to the nation’s health and vigour that it hasn’t collectively declared itself exhausted. Arguably parties have created a vibrant new sub-section of the economy. But, given that the average five-year-old now expects a party with live entertainment and a goody bag that represents a decent return (ie, profit) on the present she had to buy the hostess, the strain on individual finances is not to be taken lightly.

Is this another severe case of I Party Therefore I Am syndrome? Have we seen so many pictures of celebrities arriving at/ leaving parties that we no longer recognise any other modus vivendi? Ironically, most celebrities manage seven minutes max at the average festivity – less even than Anna Wintour – so the scarcity of photographic evidence showing them actually enjoying one isn’t coincidental.

On the bright side, more parties means more clothes and other sales. At the Harvey Nichols do last week to mark the arrival of The Row, the Olsen twins’ range, Amy Winehouse turned up four hours late, discovered her husband had left with Lily Cole and promptly bought two birdcages on the fourth floor. Probably the most fun she’d had all night.

Buy this

If you’re still standing at the end of the week, this glossy-red, waxed-finished cropped trench will put a spring in your step. Things to love: it’s not stiff, like some trenches we could mention, yet it has enough body for its lapels to stand to attention when required. It’s the perfect coat for indeterminate weather (ie, now), lightweight and a great colour that adds effortless impact to this season’s navy polo necks and grey trousers. It’s also rather Marniesque, except that it costs £80. From Topshop.

Twist and pout

Now is the time to try something new. Plaits are going to be huge. Did their renaissance begin with Yuliya Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s firebrand politician? Or with Carmen Kass, all swan neck and slightly ethereal plait frizz in the ads for Narciso Rodriguez’s scent?Hard though it is to say definitively who got on the plaitometer first, one thing is sure.

It wasn’t Heidi – as an article in Lula magazine points out, the original Heidi had short, curly hair. It was Hollywood Heidi who got a makeover with pigtails.

And, by the way, don’t you love that name? Pigtails, that is, not Heidi, though that’s cute, too. But pigtails – a combination of two such resolutely unmarketing speak words – exudes adorability. As do the objects themselves.

This time round, the plaits are coiled across the top of the head, Princess Leia-like, but without the bonkers plait-buns over the ears. They’re playful, neat but not severe (see Kass, last in gallery above), elegant but not to the point of sense-of-humour-failure and just perfect for when you’re having a Joni Mitchell moment which, what with the revival in Dylan and folk music, feels very now. Plus, they’re the antithesis of WAGs’ hair, dodgy bobs that have much longer tips at the front than at the back, and all those punk-lite hairdos that were on the catwalks.

And they haven’t been sported on the rent-a-trend celebrity mob. Yet.

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